Nominees for the People of Distinction | WANG Gaoang: Pioneering Frontiers to Cultivate Talents, Forging the Soul Through Research to Scale Peaks

Wang Gaoang serves as a tenured Associate Professor at the Zhejiang University-University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Institute (ZJUI). Since joining the institute in 2020, he has served as Deputy Secretary of the ZJUI Party General Branch and Secretary of the Faculty Party Branch. He has received honors including Zhejiang University Outstanding Communist Party Member, International Campus Advanced Worker, and Outstanding Class Mentor. He has long been deeply engaged in education, teaching, and talent cultivation, with outstanding achievements in curriculum development, teaching reform, and the cultivation of top-notch innovative talents.

I. Teaching According to Aptitude, Pioneering Frontiers to Enlighten, Serving as a "Forger" of Top-Notch Innovative Talents

Wang Gaoang adheres to fostering virtue through education, integrating ideological guidance, frontier knowledge, and research practice throughout the entire talent cultivation process. He has undertaken 13 all-English undergraduate and graduate courses, guided 27 summer research projects and 37 SRTP projects (including 5 national-level and 7 provincial-level projects), with cumulative participation of over one hundred students. He once offered a "Deep Learning" interest class for lower-year students, using thematic seminars, group presentations, and project practice to guide students to engage with artificial intelligence frontiers and participate in research innovation as early as possible.

He emphasizes teaching according to aptitude and interdisciplinary innovative talent cultivation. He guided 2023 civil engineering undergraduate Chai Wenhao to cross disciplines into the field of computer vision research, publishing 8 CCF-A class papers as independent first author/co-first author, and subsequently pursuing a PhD in computer science at Princeton University. He guided 2026 master's student Song Enxin in research on multimodal large models, publishing 8 high-level papers in TPAMI, CVPR, ICCV, and others, with over 1,300 Google Scholar citations, receiving the National Scholarship and the ICCV Workshop Outstanding Paper Award, and being selected as a KAUST AI Rising Star—the only master's student among the 24 selected that year—demonstrating outstanding results in top-notch innovative talent cultivation.

Figure 1: Student Song Enxin awarded KAUST AI Rising Star

II. Deepening Classroom Engagement, Forging Golden Courses, Serving as a "Constructor" of Frontier Knowledge Systems

Wang Gaoang has successively undertaken 7 undergraduate courses and 6 graduate courses, covering directions including Introduction to Computing, Data Structures, Machine Learning, Data Science and Engineering, Computer Vision, and Embodied Intelligence. The "Introduction to Computing" course he participated in building was selected as a Zhejiang Provincial First-Class Offline Undergraduate Internationalized Course. In 2024, he built Zhejiang University's first all-English "Embodied Intelligence" course from scratch, integrating frontier research such as 3D vision, spatial intelligence, world models, and embodied agents into teaching. He adopted a model of "group paper close reading + two rounds of frontier presentations + project-based practice," guiding students from frontier literature learning progressively toward algorithm design and system practice, promoting deep integration of knowledge learning, research training, and engineering practice. The course has run with high quality for two consecutive years, and he has built one smart MOOC and published one related textbook, forming a teaching system of coordinated construction of courses, textbooks, digital resources, and research practice.

Figure 2: Published textbook and built smart MOOC

III. Reforming the Old and Innovating, Empowering Through Teaching Reform, Serving as an "Explorer" of Engineering Education Innovation

As the executive head of the Electronic and Computer Engineering major, he organized the revision of the undergraduate training program, promoted the organic integration of the strengths of Chinese and Western curriculum systems, strengthened interdisciplinary training in artificial intelligence and computer engineering, participated in building the "Smart Engineering" micro-minor, and expanded interdisciplinary artificial intelligence talent cultivation paths. He actively explored AI-empowered education and teaching, conducting "AI for Education" series of empirical research, applying generative artificial intelligence to classroom teaching and practical training, with the project selected as a university-level key project. Centering on generative AI-driven engineering education innovation, he explored reforms in teaching content, training models, and evaluation systems, with related achievements approved for the 2025 Zhejiang Provincial Graduate Education Teaching Reform Project. He participated in Zhejiang University's Sustainable Development Global Summer School for four consecutive years, lecturing on the Smart City Computing and Computer Vision module; as a core member, he participated in the "China-US Youth Global Classroom," with the project selected as one of the first batch of official website-recommended projects of the Youth Exchange and Study Program, actively exploring cross-cultural and internationalized engineering talent cultivation models.

IV. Accumulating Depth to Form Momentum, Achieving Remarkable Results, Serving as a "Practitioner" of Teaching-Research Integration

The "Smart Engineering" micro-minor achievements he participated in building received the 2025 Zhejiang University Teaching Achievement Award Second Prize; "Introduction to Computing" was selected as a Zhejiang Provincial First-Class Offline Undergraduate Internationalized Course; "Embodied Intelligence" received support from two course construction projects, and the related textbook was approved for the Zhejiang University Graduate Textbook Construction Project, forming a relatively systematic set of course, textbook, and teaching reform achievements.

He serves as Secretary of the ZJUI Faculty Party Branch, actively promoting the integration of Party building with education, teaching, and talent cultivation. He received the 2023 Zhejiang University Outstanding Communist Party Member award, and honors including the International Campus 2022 Advanced Worker and the 2021-2022 Academic Year Outstanding Class Mentor, playing a demonstrative role in teaching, education, management, and service.

Figure 3: Receiving Zhejiang University Outstanding Communist Party Member honor

V. Fostering Virtue and Soul, International Collaboration, Serving as a "Leader" of National Sentiment and Global Vision

He insists on integrating value shaping throughout the entire education and teaching process, integrating socialist core values as well as the scientific spirit and patriotic sentiment of former President Zhu Kezhen into classroom and research guidance, guiding Chinese and international students to cultivate national sentiment and expand global vision. He emphasizes expanding educational scenarios through high-level research practice, guiding students to host CVPR international academic competitions and participate in the development of the large model evaluation tool VLMEvalKit, enhancing students' academic organization, teamwork, and engineering practice abilities.

He emphasizes international student cultivation. He guided Armenian undergraduate Hayk Soghomonyan in research training around embodied intelligence, completing a research closed loop from literature reading and problem definition to algorithm design and system implementation. The project was selected for the National Undergraduate Research Training Program, and the student was named a "Zhejiang University Outstanding International Student."

Professor Wang Gaoang adheres to fostering virtue and soul, pioneering frontiers to enlighten, research-based education, and international collaboration, organically connecting value guidance, classroom teaching, research innovation, and engineering practice. He has formed an educational model with International Campus characteristics in top-notch innovative talent cultivation, artificial intelligence frontier course construction, and internationalized engineering education, with outstanding educational results.